of Paris to add to these provincial collections; and in every little town you pass through you are personally urged by some native to visit the Musée. This fact may have something to do with the astonishing intellectual superiority of the French peasant over Hodge beyond the Channel. For the fact remains that you can talk to the blue-bloused son of the soil and hope to learn something from him, when the absence of loquacity and ideas and manners in Hodge will leave you discouraged and in despair. The French peasant loves so many things that educate and refine—flowers and pictures and military bands, spectacles of all kinds, and independence. [Illustration: AN OUTDOOR MEAL _Zimenez_] His standard is by no means an exalted one. His frugality is practised in the interest of his old age. His honesty is chiefly, I suspect, a shrewd protection against the probable dishonesty of others, for the simple law of comradeship demands that you shall treat fairly the man who treats you fairly. And his religion does not go down as deep as his soul, or whatever may serve him as such. It is with him merely a material influence, since it furnishes a serviceable plank for getting safely across the perilous abyss into a better world, and enables him to be decently baptised, married, and buried as a member of a Christian community. All other phases of religion—its emotions, exactions, penalties, and devices—he leaves to the foolish women-folk. Indeed, this seems to be the conviction of the average male Catholic the world over, if I may except Ireland, the one Catholic country in which I have found men to take their religion seriously, and the little Celtic corner of France, where the blue-eyed Bretons so closely resemble them. When I have visited at a French country-house in the shooting season, I have never known a male guest to attend mass, the explanation given being that _la chasse_ had begun before the hour of mass. But if a woman stayed away from mass she would create a scandal. In Spain I have seen acquaintances of mine, while their women-folk knelt and prayed with fervour, stand throughout the Sunday service with a bored and perfunctory air, only looking towards the altar and the priest at the moment of the elevation of the Host in a casually respectful way, as an officer might salute the passage of a military chief, and seemingly relieved to be able to examine again the faces and dresses of the women about them. Children barely in their teens, young lads going to school, carefully imitate this attitude of merely tolerant recognition of religious form, and their elders never dream of encouraging them to use a prayer-book, or kneel, or show any sign that the weekly mass is to them more than the bored attendance at an official ceremony.